Wyoming Skies Will Be Smokey A Bit Longer
You might have noticed those hazy skies last weekend.
It wasn't just humidity.
It's fire season again.
A rain shower passed over my house the other day and my clean car was dirty when it was over. All of those raindrops picked up smoke in the air on the way down causing dirty water to hit my car.
Smoke, drawn in and pushed down by a high-pressure system, is hazing up Western skies.
While a little of the smoke was from some small fires in Wyoming, most came from out of state and even Canada.
That's typical for this time of year.
Here you can see several fires in one area in Southern Montana.
The yellow and green dots are the air quality index. Little fire icons indicate where the fires are.
You'll also see a few small fires in Narona County, close to Casper.
Some residents of the Casper area have caught a whiff of that smoke in the air.
Pulling the map back, we can see fires to the west of Wyoming in states like Utah and Idaho.
Dry air is typical this time of year. Lighting strikes from thunderstorms that produce very little rain will cause fires in these vast wilderness areas.
This warming and dryer weather will continue as long as those high-pressure systems hang over the Western states.
The good news is that fire seasons over the past few decades have been less severe, not greater.
While some years produce more wildfires than others, the overall trend, in North America and Globally is down.
Wildfires, especially in arid parts of the United States, have always been a natural part of the environment and likely always will.
Data displayed by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, NOAA, show no discernable trend for increased drought in the United States in over 125 years.
The U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reports data on U.S. wildfires back as far as 1926.
According to NIFC data, the number of acres burned is far less now than it was throughout the early 20th century, 100 years ago.
Current acres burned run about 1/4th to 1/5th of the record values which occurred in the 1930s.
At that time, the peak wildfire burn was over 52 million acres.
In the decade since 2010, the peaks have been 10 million acres or less.
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